BUSINESS DISRUPTION - CONSUMERIZATION OF TECHNOLOGY

Today everything is becoming consumer centric, be it a common FMCG product or the latest technology, it is the consumer who is driving the business of any organization by forcing them to think and innovate. This was not the case till early 1990’s when all the technology and product innovations were driven by business or enterprise since the technology at that stage was not matured. The trend started changing with the emergence of World Wide Web in mid 1990’s when companies like Yahoo and Google developed personalized services of emails and since then most of the innovative technologies are emerging from consumer side only. For example popularity of social networking among consumers made business firms like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin such a big success. Unlike earlier days the new age consumers are demanding, eager and tech savvy and it is becoming a challenge for many firms to satisfy their needs. These days, new technologies that come-in are adopted, used and even dumped by the consumers even before they can gain acceptance by the business firms.

With this changing trend, enterprises are now increasingly looking at consumerization of technology within their own organization. One of the latest example is of Bring your own device (BYOD) concept which describes the recent trend of employees bringing their personally owned mobile devices to their work place and using those devices to access privileged company resources such as emails, fileservers and databases. As technology continues to advances, these mobile devices like smart-phones, iPhones and tablets with the richest collection of latest apps are becoming everyday commodity for most of the IT professionals and with such practices like BYOD they are able to converge their personal technology with the enterprise IT, what is commonly known as CoIT – Converged IT. It gives the employee an alternative to be self sufficient in meeting their IT needs using their personalized technology and devices. It can also bring the dispersed mobile employees together to build more than just a business; they can help build relationships that can make business a successful one.

This trend towards the adoption of not just personal devices but also personalized technology like cloud at work seems to be inexorable. In fact many firms have realized the power of social media and are providing consumerized services like Google, Facebook and Twitter as the essential components of their market strategies. As per Gartner, “Consumerization of IT” will be the most significant trend affecting IT for the next decade.

Although this consumerization of technology in enterprise or in other words the movement of consumer technology into enterprise brings a lots of scope of bringing more value to the business by revolutionizing the way it is currently done, enterprises are still reluctant to adopt it seeing it as a Business Disruptor and encroachment of consumerization on IT as its adoption will have to be backed by a lot many significant changes and reshaping of the IT as well as business model. One of the primary concerns is the loss of control of IT over the technology being used which leads to security concerns. Few of the major concerns are listed below.

• Loss of Control and track over the way operations will be carried out in an enterprise.
• Ambiguity in the compliance and ownership for data security.
• Data and access retrieval once the employee leave the organization.
• Careful planning and appropriate policies need to be defined ensuring there are no loopholes in the security.
• It will require more efficient and scalable database operations.
• New IT support system needs to be developed for converging the personal devices with non-standard operating system with the enterprise network and database.
• The dynamism in the field of technology. The speed with which the new technology comes in and become obsolete. It can lead to management Chaos.
• The volume of options available in terms of technologies to the consumers.
• It can lead to business risks.

In view of the above concerns regarding consumerization of technology at work place, enterprises feel that it will disrupt their normal business. But these concerns can be allayed if the IT team starts to learn to manage and govern the ever changing technology as today the market is dynamically evolving and the company needs to adapt to such innovative ideas if they want to be successful in such kind of environment.

The security and controlling concern can be remedied by using technologies like Intel’s “Trusted Execution Technology”, Data encryption with easy-to-use key management for virtual and cloud environments, unified security management solutions and other mobile security solutions like Mobile Data Protection (MDP) and Mobile Device Management (MDM). Careful and proper descriptive planning and policy definition outlining the rules of technology engagement is also a must for implementing such kind of change. With these capabilities in place the corporate data can be securely accessed and shared across physical, virtual and cloud environments and embrace consumerization.

For the business risks that consumerized technology might expose an enterprise to, it should be noted and thought upon that the business risks will only become bigger if companies do not capitalize on capable and skilful value creating employees which is developed and enhanced using consumerized technology. It brings and enhances the agility and productivity level of employees. So, there is actually a tradeoff between the two types of business risks and many other implications of using and not using the consumerized technology as well which a company must consider before making a final call regarding implementation of consumerized services like Bring your own device.

Finally it can be concluded that a win-win situation can be achieved for all the stakeholders of a company – the consumers, the technology vendors and the organization itself if it realizes the immense innovation opportunities by integrating popular tech-solutions in their enterprise system and instead of being considered as a business disruptor it can rather be a primary enabler for business growth. 

Ankita Singh

Class of 2014